Are We What We Eat? Food and Identity in Late Twentieth-Century ...

by performing “mundane activities [such] as eating ethnic foods” and “enacting holiday rituals” (75). I suggest that Alba’s general assertion regarding the performative component of identity formation also applies to ethnic Americans like the García family from Julia Alvarez’s novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, who strive to assimilate into the dominant American culture by performing the necessary culturally coded behaviors, culinary or otherwise. Thus, whether reconnecting to one’s ethnic culture or assimilating (or at least passing) into the dominant American culture, the individual’s feelings, the basis of consent, must manifest themselves in actions—such as cooking and eating, the tangible effects of consent.

To construct a socially acceptable and functioning cultural identity, self-identification and performance are not enough; in addition to the psychological and behavioral components, there is a necessary but often overlooked third, the social component. As Wsevolod W. Isajiw notes, identity “is a matter of a double boundary, a boundary from within, maintained by the socialization process, and a boundary from without established by the process of intergroup relations” (122). As Isajiw suggests, one’s identity depends not only on being accepted by the group to which one hopes to belong but also on being excluded from and by those groups that one wants to avoid. Thus, as Mary C. Waters explains, because identity is a combination of “self-ascription and ascription of others” (17), some individuals, because of their descent, “may be socially constrained to accept an ethnic identity” (18).¹⁰ Even Sollors, who argues that all Americans may act as “free agents” with respect to their identities, concedes that society, in fact, may hamper and even prevent an individual from constructing his or her desired identity: “How can consent (consensus) be achieved in a country whose citizens are of such heterogeneous descent? And how can dissent be articulated without falling back on myths of descent?” (6). With these questions, Sollors suggests the limitations of consent in a nation that primarily values descent when defining racial, ethnic, and cultural identities. Certainly, the literature demonstrates this often tenuous relationship between one’s descent and one’s ability to consent. In Alvarez’s novel, for example, although